Meet The Safariland Multimillionaire Getting Rich Off Tear Gas and More In The Defense Industry

(L-R) Richard Ziegelasch, Warren Kanders and Frank Minerva attend an award show at New York Stock Exchange on May 21, 2007 in New York City. (Photo by JOE SCHILDHORN/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

At the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Tijuana in late November, U.S. border agents fired tear gas canisters at a group of migrants, including women and children. The canisters were made by Defense Technology, a riot gear and chemical munition company that is part of Safariland LLC, a global defense manufacturer based in Jacksonville, Florida. Safariland’s majority owner and CEO, Warren Kanders, has made a fortune over the past three decades building a diversified network of defense equipment companies whose customers include the U.S. government as well as U.S. allies including Turkey, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Israel, according the War Resisters League, an organization that promotes nonviolence. Forbes estimates that Kanders is worth at least $700 million, the majority of which is based on the value of his company.

Safariland consists of 19 brands. The company, which has estimated revenues of $500 million, sells everything from body armor and riot gear to tear gas and pepper spray. It is the world’s largest manufacturer of bomb suits worn by explosive-disposal technicians and the largest provider of body armor for law enforcement in the U.S., according to Kanders. The biggest source of revenue is the body armor business, Kanders told Forbes in an interview on Monday.

Safariland’s products are categorized as nonlethal or less-lethal, including tear gas, which is banned by various international treaties during wartime. Yet governments around the world have increasingly adopted the chemical weapon as a method of crowd control. Though categorized as nonlethal or less-lethal, tear gas use has reportedly led to civilian deaths in the past, including in France in early December. Kanders, however, describes his company’s offerings as benign. “Whether it’s under Obama—he was fond of using these products very frequently—or under Bush or Clinton or whomever, we are there to make nonlethal products and to provide those products to friends of our government through very prescribed channels,” Kanders told Forbes.

Kanders’ work is earning him plenty of critics. In February, four graduates of Brown University, Kanders’ alma mater, wrote an op-ed in the college newspaper that criticized the university’s decision to let him sit on the advisory council of IBES, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. “From Egypt to the occupied Palestinian territories, Ferguson to Standing Rock, the weapons sold and promoted by The Safariland Group have been used to suppress protests, maim or kill activists and intimidate social movements,” the op-ed argued. Kanders “should not have an advisory role or any other role at Brown,” it said. In response, Kanders penned a letter to the editor. “There are countless anecdotes of our products saving the lives of these brave men and women,” he wrote. "As with any product, the ultimate responsibility for its use falls on the individuals involved in their use.”

On November 30, 95 employees at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, where Kanders is vice chairman of the board of trustees, published a letter saying they did not feel comfortable working for the museum as long as a defense contractor like Kanders served on the museum’s board. They sent it in response to reports that Safariland’s tear gas had been used at the U.S.-Mexico border to deter migrants. including families with young children, in late November. Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, addressed the concerns of the staff in a letter on Monday but did not mention Kanders or whether he would be asked to resign.

“We feel it is unfortunate that Warren Kanders was singled out,” four members of the board of trustees wrote in an internal email later on Monday, which was obtained by Forbes: “We have an extraordinarily committed, thoughtful, active and generous Board: together we shall get past this challenging moment.”

Kanders addressed the Whitney community the same day. “My hope is that providing facts about Safariland, and the vital products it produces for public safety professionals worldwide, can lead to a more informed and constructive dialogue as we move forward together,” he said in a statement.

From Kanders’ perspective, there is no moral dilemma or reason for him to step down from any board. “I have pretty thick skin. I do what I feel is right,” he told Forbes. “People need to be protected and police officers with families are living today because of what I do, what our company does.”

Although he has acquired more than 20 defense companies in his lifetime, Kanders, now 61, did not get into the industry until he was in his late 30s. He first worked at Morgan Stanley in New York in its mergers and acquisitions department. He then went on to work for Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison and helped him manage his assets in the U.S. He quit and moved into retail, buying up 205 eyewear stores over four years. In 1996 he sold the business for $228 million to the French lens maker Essilor, Forbesreported in 2006; Essilor is now part of the Italian eyewear giant Luxottica. Kanders pocketed an estimated $30 million from the Essilor sale and used $3 million of that to buy 70% of a small company that sold body armor to law enforcement officers.

In partnership with Wall Street veteran Robert Schiller, Kanders started building a defense services business that they later named Armor Holdings. Kanders said he predicted there would be more conflict in the world the moment American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. “I was looking out the window. I saw the first plane coming down,” he said on Monday. “There happened to be a person in our group who was a Holocaust survivor who just ran out of the building. He thought we were all going to die. I realized at that time that we needed to be ready for this,” by which he meant more conflict.

Over the course of about a decade, Schiller and Kanders acquired 28 defense companies for an undisclosed sum. (Kanders told Forbes that “there was a very high return on investment capital.”) They turned the $10 million (sales) body armor business into Armor Holdings, a diversified publicly traded corporation that pulled in $2.4 billion in sales in 2006.

After the sale, Kanders focused on growing his outdoors equipment business, Clarus Corporation, in which he had first invested several years earlier. Today the company consists of Black Diamond Equipment, an outdoors equipment company founded by Patagonia-billionaire Yvon Chouinard in 1957; and an Austrian outdoor safety company called Pieps, which sells shovels, backpacks and more. Clarus also owns bullet manufacturer Sierra Bullets, which Kanders claims made the bullet that killed Bin Laden in 2011. (“More than one manufacturer provides this item to the Department of Defense. As a result we could not say which manufacturer provided this item in a particular case,” a spokesperson for the Department of Defense said.)

A year after BAE bought Armor Holdings, it created an umbrella company called Safariland for a portion of Armor’s brands that exclusively sold to law enforcement and sporting markets. In 2012, Kanders and his private investment firm—along with the Safariland management team—bought Safariland back from BAE Systems for $124 million. The deal made Kanders the majority owner of Safariland.

The nonlethal weapons industry is expected to reach $8.4 billion in sales globally by 2020, according to market research company MarketsandMarkets. As the industry grows, Kanders sees more opportunities to expand Safariland. “I’m very comfortable with our business—we’re technological leaders in every aspect of what we do. We expect to continue that,” he said. “I feel good about it.”

Deniz Cam is a wealth reporter at Forbes Magazine, where her work includes billionaires’ philanthropy and influence in politics. Born and raised in Istanbul, Deniz graduated from Brown in 2015. After Brown, she worked for Brain World Magazine and then interned at Forbes. In ...